​Nicholas Edwards is a senior quality assurance engineer at EverFi, an education company covering everything from K-12 STEM education to online courses in financial literacy. Nicholas’s story stands out to me because his path has been more linear than most - he's actually doing the thing he said he wanted to do at 17 - while still maintaining the flexibility necessary to find the right opportunities. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

When you were 17, what did you want to be?

I didn’t know. I feel like it just came out of nowhere, at maybe 14 or 15, teachers and my parents started explaining to me that I had to start thinking about it. And I technically went to a college prep school so I think I had it better than a lot of people, to at least have people try to prepare me at that age. But I also feel like, a lot of people are pushed into stuff when they’re younger.

What is the When I Was 17 Project?

When I Was 17 is a blog series dedicated to collecting the varied stories of people's career paths, what they envisioned themselves doing when they were teenagers and how that evolved over the course of their lives. I started this project with the goal of illustrating that it's okay not to know exactly what you want to do when you're 17; many successful people didn't, and these are a few of their stories.